Crushing the Drug Dealers of Washington Square

Published: November 9, 1987

(Page 3 of 3)

A man community members descibed as an aggressive officer, Lieutenant McKenna, was put in charge of 29 officers assigned to the park. His men compiled dossiers on dozens of repeat offenders operating in the park, and observed them through binoculars from hiding places in neighborhood apartments, stores and university buildings.

After officers saw a sale, they would arrest the buyers and sellers, even if the transaction involved only a small quantity of marijuana. Most important, perhaps, three groups of crack dealers, headed by men who had carefully developed sales schedules and drug hiding places to avoid detection, were identified and arrested, Lieutenant McKenna said. Park 'Regulars' Are Vanishing

In all, 1,387 arrests were made by Oct. 25, most of them for misdemeanor sales and possessions of marijuana. Almost all of those arrested, the police said, came from outside Greenwich Village.

According to judges and prosecutors in Manhattan, the courts have also improved their ability to deal with repeat offenders arrested in the park and other drug sales sites in Manhattan. In April the state courts established a special drug section in Manhattan that has disposed of more than 1,500 felony cases with guilty pleas - cases that, they say, may have lingered for months if they remained in the regular section of criminal and supreme courts.

One result of the police operations is that many of the park's regulars have disappeared. One, Mary Richards, 27, of 37-12 88th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, a marijuana merchant who bragged last year to a reporter that she earned $300 a day in the park, is now in jail, the police say, after her 10th arrest.

One reason it took years for the department to make a long-term commitment to arresting the dealers in Washington Square may involve the changing police perceptions of the seriousness of street dealing.

Last year, community members and uniformed officers assigned to the park said the problem there was severe. But the special narcotics officers assigned to spot drug trends and pursue major investigations for all of Southern Manhattan repeatedly dismissed reports of the drug problem in Washington Square Park as exaggerated and a problem of ''community perceptions.''

However, Deputy Chief Francis C. Hall, commander of the narcotics division, said the department could no longer dismiss street drug bazaars as ''only marijuana,'' or ''only street sales.''

''Those excuses are no longer acceptable,'' Chief Hall said. ''It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. In Washington Square Park we lit a candle.''